July 31, 2009

I am happy to show you several of our small accomplishments around our home. First, I want to show you this door knob, usually boring but not this time. You see, we have officially bought all of our interior door knobs and every room has a door on it. What a wonderful step!

Next, our lights. We have found one for each of our rooms. Here is the guest room, aka: blue room. The study, aka: green room

Our master bedroom, aka: orange room

Even the bathrooms have their lights. The first is the light and the fixture further back is the bathroom fan.

Each of these things have slowly been installed over the past few weeks but now that they are all in place it is so wonderful!

July 30, 2009

If you remember we moved our bed up to our orange bedroom in early June yet our closet was not done and so our clothes stayed in the basement. Mornings became interesting as I would run up and down the two flights of stairs trying to get read for the day. So this past week Josh and I started transforming our closets!! First we had to lay a new sub-floor. Then my job started, laying linoleum tiles. And yes, that is my bright pink hair blower that my grandma Davis gave me when I was 10 I believe. It has Kathleen Davis written all over it in my dad's handwriting for when I kept it in my gym locker in 7th grade. That blow dryer has been with me in ever state that I have lived in. You must think, Oh she must blow dry her hair after every shower and rain storm but nope, that wouldn't be true. The fact of the matter really is, I never blow dry my hair. I hate blow drying my hair b/c it make it puff up so bad. So why do I keep my hot pink blow dryer from my grandma? Well it is really good for warming up the glue on the back of tiles and plus, my mothers like to use it when they come to visit. But I am getting off topic, back to the closets.

While I worked on the tile upstairs Josh laid the sub-floor in the guest room closet. I finished the tile work in that closet on my "sick" day earlier this week.

After the floor was done Josh hung the clothes rods and I moved all of our clothes up.

Now all that is left is the shelving that Josh is building.

Hopefully the will be done this weekend and the closet will be complete.

July 29, 2009

Yesterday I had an unexpected day off. My illness, not really sure what to call it so I guess I can just stick with Paul's description and call it my thorn in my flesh, hit me in the early hours of the morning and prevented me from making it to work. With just one car to get both Josh and me to work by the time I was able to get up Josh had left and had started his day. So I was left with an unexpected day at home and I decided to make the most of it.

I did several loads of laundry. Painted and hung three more interior doors

Cooked dinner for six, cleaned the house, finished some tiling (pictures to come soon) and took care of countless little projects that have needed attention around the house. Although it wasn't the way I wish to spend my vacation time from work I believe it was a good day with so much being accomplished. Always thankful for unexpected blessing.

Monday night Josh and I were able to spend the evening with our friends the Kulps. It was so much fun to sit around their table for 8 and enjoy a great meal together.

Then as the boys worked on Drywall in the new garage Amy and I canned apples. You might remember this post from when I initially canned apples last April. This time around Amy and I decided it would be more fun to do it together. Even though it was a late night it was very fun to go work with such great friends and be able to end the evening with 1/2 a ceiling drywalled and 11 quarts of apple pie filling.

July 27, 2009

This past week has been the annual Fairbank's celebration of Golden Days. A look back on the origin of Fairbanks and its Gold Rush era. On Saturday Josh, Mother and I attended the parade and I thought you might enjoy a glace of some Fairbanks culture:

Old Pioneers

Alaska or Bust, a flat bad trailer carrying the city's line dancing group. Mother is so excited to share this with her Line Dancing class back in Texas. These were the flags that were handed out, pitiful if you ask me. Isn't anything made here anymore?

There was the army band and the big rubber ducky race

An old sourdough pioneer and his donkey

This truck just made me laugh, I can't believe it runs.

Our UAF hockey team, the Nanooks

Humm, this sign is so true!!

This lady and her husband rode these bikes the entire parade route, amazing.

The classic Golden day prison, the sheriff and just one look at the many "saloon girls" that we saw, the golden rush wasn't a modest one at all.

A commemoration of all of Alaska's Bush Pilots

Overall we called this the parade that never ends. After almost 2 hours we left but what we did see was fun. A good chance for mother to once again see something just a little different while here this summer.

July 24, 2009

Not to be forgotten, I need to show you our finishing work in the other bathrooms of the house. The third floor bathroom now has all of the cabinets permanently in place and functional faucets. (The lamp is just there for safe keeping and the sticker on the door of the cabinet is being worked on, I have tried goo gone and many other solvents to get the sticker off. One of these days it will be gone)

With two sinks we had to buy two faucets for one bathroom. We decided on the one you see and it has the water lever on the right and a soap dispenser on the left. It was very fun to go out and buy an industrial sized container of soap and fill them up the other day. Because of the layout of the bathroom there isn't room to hang a toilet paper holder so we have been in search of a free standing holder instead. Just the other night I found one that would work. And keeping up with the bathroom trend, the basement bathroom has also had a change. I took out the medicine cabinet that we had gotten years ago at a secondhand store and replaced it with the medicine cabinet that had come with the vanity set. It looks very nice!!

I was just telling mother the other day that I am really at the point where I would love to have at least one room in the house done. A room where we could close the door and say, don't worry, nothing in there needs to be worked on, bought, installed or touched up. But alas when you build a house and live in it this doesn't happen for a very long time! But these bathrooms are coming together and maybe, sometime soon we might have a room that is done. This weekend is one filled with plans for closets. Check back in on Monday to see the changes.

July 23, 2009

Do you remember when I showed your our main floor bathroom and it looked like this?

Then I painted the ceiling white, the walls brown and finally took the plastic off of the tub and the bathroom looked like this:I am happy to now present a very different bathroom to you. One that has a vanity, sink, toilet and faucet that works.

On my to do list, that is on the right hand side of the blog, was "scrap the drywall mud off of the tub" and this past weekend I made it my goal to get that item done. With the help of my two mothers I scrapped and scrubbed the shower and tub.

I then also installed the curtain rod and shower curtain.

Our shower curtain, liner and all of our towels were wedding presents and it is very exciting to finally pull them out of their box after over three years and see how amazingly wonderful they look up in my house!! There are still many little things to do in the bathroom to make it a completed room but don't worry, you will get to see each step as it gets done!

July 22, 2009

It was fun to work on framing up the inside of our house as the exterior walls were completed. We built inside walls, closets, door frames and evident halls between the rooms. One of the most fun was when Josh built the archways that would be over the two hall doorways. The plan is to have Josh's mother create stain glass crescents to fill those spaces.

Oh we still had so very much to do, we still do, but seeing the shape of rooms start to emerge was a very fun time indeed.